Matchbox

Audience-driven artist collaborations

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Inspiration

Why are we here today? Meeting people, networking, working on cool stuff, coming up with new solutions we wouldn't have come up with on our own. Filling in each other's weakness. It's fun to collaborate and it literally makes the world go round with the amazing phenomenon of reproduction. I'm sure you all know how this works. Just in case you don't, I'm going to go through a few slides. The homo sapien is a two-gender species. When a man and a woman perform the famed collaboration know only as ________. Jk.

Collaborations are a big deal. They are getting bigger. For myself as an artist, collaborations are lighting-quick way for me to reach new audiences. If I have 10,000 fans and I collab on a song with another artist with 10,000 fans, I can double my fanbase, reaching 20,000 fans with just one song. I can enter new genres. I can attribute new meaning to my identity, e.g., making a political statement or proving worth amongst trendy audiences or detaching myself from a particular pigeonhole I might be in. I can enter foreign markets. I can multiply my fanbase my even higher multiples. Collaborations tap into

Collaborations are fun. People love seeing things paired together and rivaled against each other. It's a dead-simple concept that can yield dramatic results. Sports revolve around rivalry, which are like inverse collaborations. But within that, each team members collaborates. Anyway, you get it-- these are important.

What it does

Replaces and supplements PR agents' work of coordinating collaborations between artists.

V1: Users propose and vote on artist collaborations.

V2: Artists can publicize their own availability for collaborations. These are undecided collaborations that the artists are looking to find. Other artists can

How we built it

Proto.io

Challenges we ran into

Lost our programmer after the first day. Lost one of the designers. One of our designers was only really available the first day. Pretty small team varying between 2-4 people at a given time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Very well fleshed-out idea with a lot of different ways to implement it and scale it organically.

What we learned

The value of team diversity and the directions that can be taken with lots of input.

What's next for Matchbox

Undecided.

Built With

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Updates

posted an update —

Full project notes

Why Collaborations?

Why are we here today? Meeting people, networking, working on cool stuff, coming up with new solutions we wouldn't have come up with on our own. Filling in each other's weakness. It's fun to collaborate and it literally makes the world go round with the amazing phenomenon of reproduction. I'm sure you all know how this works. Just in case you don't, I'm going to go through a few slides. The homo sapien is a two-gender species. When a man and a woman perform the famed collaboration know only as ________. Jk.

Collaborations are a big deal. They are getting bigger. For myself as an artist, collaborations are lighting-quick way for me to reach new audiences. If I have 10,000 fans and I collab on a song with another artist with 10,000 fans, I can double my fanbase, reaching 20,000 fans with just one song. I can enter new genres. I can attribute new meaning to my identity, e.g., making a political statement or proving worth amongst trendy audiences or detaching myself from a particular pigeonhole I might be in. I can enter foreign markets. I can multiply my fanbase my even higher multiples. Collaborations tap into

Collaborations are fun. People love seeing things paired together and rivaled against each other. It's a dead-simple concept that can yield dramatic results. Sports revolve around rivalry, which are like inverse collaborations. But within that, each team members collaborates. Anyway, you get it-- these are important.

...(continuation) To bring this into the music world, If you think combinations sound arbitrary and useless or even easy to come up with, you might not realize the world-changing value created by successful collaborations. Biggie Smalls and Tupac.

Features

  • Vote button
  • Main image/video displayed two potential collaborators
  • Title
  • Share

  • Favorite

  • Create collaboration proposal

  • Browse Favorites

Goals

Focus market attention on artists. Get people excited about what artists can do. Get artists' recognition. Get the audience involved with the creative process. Make them feel in control. Make it easier for artists to find their next collaboration-- this makes it easy because the audience has expressed interest in something specific. Audience is more likely to follow an artist if they have a vested interest. Similar to have fantasy football participants watch football very closely. Create a way for an audience to actually care what an artist does -- it's a lot harder for the audience to propose arbitrary creative suggestions.

Target Market

This service replaces much of what PR agents do. But, it can also be used by them. By providing a platform to manage, facilitate, and mediate collaborations, PR agents don't need to do the same kind of digging they previously would. They can see where fan interest lies. By formalizing the collaboration protocol, this website offloads some of the burden of phone call screening because there would eventually be more people transacting via this website instead of cold calls or cold messages. Right now, the world of artist collaboration is transacted with cold calls and cold messages. Cold calls and messages suck. Nobody likes them. They lead to wasted time and cause anxiety.

Collaboration propositions are shareable, which means anyone can distribute one of these propositions.

Mainstream audience - V1 This version is for established artists to solidify market traction by earning audience investment

This will appeal to:
    pop culture
    fans
    superfans
    music aficionados
    meme culture
    artists and labels can use this to spark discussion about collaborations with other labels
    it can be used as a metric during discussions in interviews and plans about the future

Independent artists - V2 This version is for all artists to find other artists to collaborate with. This version adds security to transactions by providing escrow service to mediate problematic collaborations.

Marketing

Designed to excite users about possible songs. Stimulate conversation about artists. Stimulates drama about rivalries. Cross-pollinates fanbases. Even if artists don't get together, these pairings will bring fanbases together in discussions about what should/shouldn't happen.

Since this site is governed by audience participation, it's designed for viral distribution.

Monetization

V2 of the website adds crowdfunding. With crowdfunding, every collaboration gets a goal. users can donate money just like

Voting

voting -- if a certain number is reached, public demand will overwhelm them to take action. change.org other websites - petitioning

This site is a petition website. Petitions are a format that have been used within our nation's government and other democracies for years. Our government is founded on gathering public consensus via voting and petitions are the easiest way we know of to gauge public interest and make decisions that everyone can agree upon. We're bringing this political tool to the music world, introducing democracy to the music world. And making engaging the public within the creative world that otherwise appears remote, distant, detached.

Tech Stack

No log in necessary.

Layers of versions we plan to implement with this website:

2 celebrities get voted on

independent, smaller artists can find similarly talented artists. - bidding toward making a collaboration happen if enough money was provided to make a lesser known person collab with a celeb

Use Cases

- user clicks shared facebook ad clicks
- bring two stars together that are fighting, forcing them to get along... and they'll do it if enough people want it

Mash-up creation

User selects 2 artists (that may be registered with Spotify)
User selects a topic for collaboration
    Needs to be moderated. Can use special APIs that YouTube uses to check for profanity.
Dashboard of collaborations

Will this work?

New Kids on the Block - They weren't getting back together until they discovered audience interest. They can't ignore a demand that's so high.
Boxing contenders -- Pressure from the public makes artists feel pushed into collaboration because the audience wants to see it.

Future Optimizations

May allow users to customize the preview video.

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